{"id":9416,"date":"2023-07-05T12:49:11","date_gmt":"2023-07-05T16:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/?p=9416"},"modified":"2024-03-04T14:51:38","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:51:38","slug":"take-the-fork-in-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/issues\/summer-2023-cat\/take-the-fork-in-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Take the Fork in the Road"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How Brad Wetherbee Became 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Shark Guy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Brad Wetherbee has studied shark evolution, migration patterns, and habitats for more than 30 years. He is also a dedicated teacher who creates opportunities for his students to learn about sharks through fieldwork and hands-on learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Meredith Haas ’07, M.O. ’22<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten years from now, students in Professor Brad Wetherbee\u2019s class will remember they swam with whale sharks. Not the research methods or their notes. They\u2019ll remember they swam with the largest shark and the largest of any fish alive today, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSwimming with whale sharks is on the bucket list for a lot of people. This class is probably the only place where you can experience that as a student,\u201d Wetherbee says, discussing an August 2022 trip to Mexico he led with 12 undergraduates from the 溏心vlog免费B站 as part of a field research methods class he teaches. \u201cWhale sharks are huge plankton\/filter feeders, so they\u2019re not dangerous, but you can\u2019t catch them and handle them on a boat. So, we go to Mexico, where we can observe and study them in their habitat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherbee, an assistant professor of biology at 溏心vlog免费B站, is known as the \u201cshark guy\u201d around campus\u2014and around the state of Rhode Island. He has spent more than three decades studying shark evolution, migration patterns, and habitats, with a focus on conservation. His office is a testament to that research: Upon entry, you are greeted by an 18-inch tiger shark jaw with perfectly notched, serrated teeth. This is just one of a dozen specimens among an orchestrated chaos of memorabilia from his field research and travels. His office also features pictures of family, vast collections of books, and stacks upon stacks of papers\u2014some that need to be graded and some\u2014current articles on shark research\u2014he means to read. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherbee favors Hawaiian shirts and wears an expression best described as inscrutable. But get him talking about sharks and its clear he loves his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are a lot of students who say, \u2018I just want to do what you do right now,\u2019 and I say \u2018Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time getting to where I am now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A self-described quiet and shy kid, Wetherbee, now 63, says his journey to becoming a beloved professor and respected shark expert wasn\u2019t one of pure intent. In fact, growing up, he didn\u2019t have any particular interest in sharks. Rather, his journey was a series of forked roads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy dad used to quote Yogi Berra: \u2018When you come to a fork in the road, take it,\u2019\u201d Wetherbee says, explaining that it’s not about which direction you choose as long you have a direction. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to go somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherbee\u2019s father was a fish biologist for the state of Oregon and would often take him into the field, where he learned about the fish living in the rivers and alpine lakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI liked going to work with him a lot when I was a little kid,\u201d Wetherbee says. \u201cWe\u2019d drive up to the mountains, to these high lakes, and hike and go snorkeling.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although instilled with an appreciation for wildlife and nature, and more knowledge about biology than most people his age, Wetherbee was like many first-year college students who don\u2019t know what they want to do or who they want to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter a year, I thought, \u2018What do I like more than biology? Probably nothing,\u2019\u201d he says. By the time he graduated, he realized he wanted to continue his studies because he had only scratched the surface. \u201cI got to the point where I kind of understood things, but not that well. I realized there was way more to learn, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both of his parents and many of his friends went to Oregon State University, where Wetherbee says he probably would\u2019ve gone to study birds. Instead, he took a year off traveling. While visiting a friend in Hawaii, he discovered Gunnar Thorson\u2019s Life in the Sea. <\/em>Published in 1971, Thorson used vivid illustrations to provide a broad overview of marine life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere wasn\u2019t much in the field of marine biology back then,\u201d explains Wetherbee as he pulls out a copy of Thorson\u2019s book from his bookshelf. \u201cI thought that if I could sit there and read this book for pleasure, then of course marine biology was what I was going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His revelation would ultimately land him in Florida at the University of Miami. All he knew when he got there was that he wanted to work with vertebrates. He talked to several professors studying fish behavior and turtle physiology, but it wasn\u2019t until he talked to \u201cthis guy\u201d studying sharks that his interest was really piqued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019ve got so many things for you to do. You\u2019re going to be out in the middle of the night tracking and catching sharks in a boat.\u2019 He tried to make it sound like it was hard, but it seemed very exciting,\u2019\u201d Wetherbee says, adding that he was also intimidated. \u201cI thought, \u2018This guy is in National Geographic<\/em>. I\u2019m not going to be able to work with him.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat guy\u201d was Samuel Gruber, a world-renowned shark biologist and founder of the American Elasmobranch Society\u2014the world’s largest association of shark and ray scientists. Under Gruber\u2019s mentorship, Wetherbee took his first steps into shark research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI liked it right away, and I realized there was a lot less known about sharks than most other fish,\u201d says Wetherbee, explaining that the knowledge gap existed in part because sharks didn\u2019t hold any monetary value and were hard to study. \u201cThere was a huge black hole of things people didn\u2019t know about sharks. I found that attractive because I thought I could work on this stuff my entire life and never run out of things to do.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, he wasn\u2019t sure if he was doing a good job or whether he\u2019d be a good scientist. He recalls another graduate student asking him a bunch of questions about sharks that he didn\u2019t have the answers for. \u201cI realized this person, who studied coral or something, knew more about sharks than I did. And I didn\u2019t like that. So, I made it a priority to read everything I could. I developed somewhat of an encyclopedic knowledge about sharks,\u201d he says with a wry smile, pointing to one of the stacks of research papers on his desk. \u201cI don\u2019t have as much time now to go through all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The knowledge he amassed helped to build his confidence throughout graduate school. He found that despite his naturally shy and quiet nature, he was good at talking in front of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBefore, people would have thought I\u2019d be the last person to get up in front of 300 students and give a lecture because I was very quiet,\u201d Wetherbee says. \u201cBut part of research is communicating your findings. I wasn\u2019t necessarily that good, but I talked rather than just reciting memorized information. So, I realized I could do research and I could teach. That\u2019s how I decided I wanted to go get a Ph.D.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherbee would soon find himself enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Hawaii studying deep-sea sharks. To obtain samples of sharks to study, he worked as a technician on a five-week orange roughy trawl off the coast of New Zealand that would often catch deep-sea species as bycatch. When he was done with his work for the day, he would spend his nights studying the physiology of anything found in the nets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know much about deep-sea sharks, but one of the most interesting things I learned during that experience was that they\u2019re neutrally buoyant. Most sharks are 5% heavier than water, so if they don\u2019t swim, they\u2019ll sink. But, because deep-sea sharks have these large livers with a lot of low-density oil, they float and barely have to swim, so they can conserve energy,\u201d he explains. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherbee also worked as a research assistant at the University of Hawaii, tracking fish and baby hammerhead sharks with acoustic transmitters. That led to his participation on a team tracking tiger sharks in response to the state\u2019s call for a shark culling after Hawaii\u2019s first fatal attack in 33 years. The team\u2019s efforts showed the vast distance tiger sharks travel, quelling any belief that a cull would be effective in killing the shark responsible for the attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was like a scene out of Jaws<\/em>. They could go out and kill a shark but the likelihood of it being the culprit was very low,\u201d says Wetherbee, noting that this experience changed the focus of his career. \u201cI became hooked on that area of research because it could make a positive contribution towards wise management of the population.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Brad Wetherbee was interviewed by NBC\u2019s Kerry Sanders for a Today Show segment on his Shark Camp, a program for high schoolers, in July 2022.<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n

He brought this interest to Rhode Island as a postdoc at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Narragansett Laboratory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI guess it’s a prestigious postdoc,\u201d he says with a shrug. \u201cBut they wanted me to work with dead sharks people caught in fishing tournaments. I said I wanted to track sharks instead, so I found funding to track sandbar sharks in Delaware Bay. It was exactly what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This eventually led to his work with the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University, where he studied and tracked the movements of North Atlantic shortfin mako sharks, which have been on the verge of collapse due to longline fisheries targeting blue sharks and swordfish, according to a Pew Research Center report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHis work under Guy Harvey [produced] a really critical and large spatial data set of shark distributions,\u201d says Eric Schneider, a marine biologist for Rhode Island\u2019s Department of Environmental Management, who worked with Wetherbee to better understand where mako sharks spend most of their time and where they are most vulnerable. \u201cOver the years, colleagues would say, \u2018You should reach out to Brad. He\u2019s a good scientist. You should see if he wants to partner with you.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their work helped fisheries manage mako populations and led to changes in fishing regulations for the species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now known for tracking and studying the movement patterns of mako sharks, Wetherbee has been in Rhode Island 22 years, teaching at 溏心vlog免费B站 for almost as long and bringing experiential opportunities to high school and college students interested in learning about sharks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI really like both research and teaching. I wouldn\u2019t want to do just one,\u201d Wetherbee says, noting that sometimes the emphasis on research can eclipse the value of teaching. \u201cIt\u2019s a noble profession to educate. A lot of students want to learn, and I like interacting with them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to offering a weeklong summer shark camp for high school students, Wetherbee leads directed field research courses to give his undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to learn outside the classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cSome of them have never been on the ocean or on a boat,\u201d he says. One, Colby Kresge \u201921, “had never been out of the country, and last summer we went to the Cayman Islands, Mexico, Tasmania, and South Africa. It expanded his world 300%.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFieldwork was an important part for me in considering graduate school,\u201d says Kresge, now a graduate student studying with Wetherbee. \u201cThe other part was that Dr. Wetherbee wanted to take a chance on me. Before then, I hadn\u2019t felt seen in school and I wasn\u2019t exactly sure what I wanted to do. I quickly took a liking to his research and to the opportunities he provided for students. We got to handle and release these beautiful mako and blue sharks. As an inexperienced fisher and marine studies student, I was fascinated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing the students change from these experiences is why Wetherbee says he puts in the effort he does. \u201cI do it because if I was in that situation, I would want someone to give me an opportunity. Sometimes it sparks an interest, and they go study sharks. Or they go do something else. But it\u2019s helping them take the fork in the road, and I like that more than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And maybe they\u2019ll remember how they got to swim with whale sharks, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Brad Wetherbee Became 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Shark Guy Brad Wetherbee has studied shark evolution, migration patterns, and habitats for more than 30 years. He is also a dedicated teacher who creates opportunities for his students to learn about sharks through fieldwork and hands-on learning. By Meredith Haas ’07, M.O. ’22 Ten years from now, students in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[316],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer-2023-cat","architecture-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9416"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13298,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions\/13298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}